U.S.

Pilot: Why remotely piloted airliners are not the solution to aircraft accidents

In the wake of the Germanwings crash, some pundits and other experts are suggesting remotely piloted airliners as a viable remedy for incapacitated — or even rogue — pilots.

But as an airline captain, I can't picture an airliner completely reliant on ground-based guidance, data and analysis.

Any remote-control solution hinges on a futuristic technical perfection, and there's the rub: Today's remotely piloted vehicle technology has so far chalked up an accident rate nearly 40% higher than that of airliners with pilots on board.

In the 212 drone crashes documented by the civilian watchdog group Drone Wars since 2001, a never-before-encountered fatal flaw — "data link failure" — was the root cause in many of the losses.

Unlike aircraft with flesh and blood pilots, remotely piloted jetliners rely upon two factors that have to be 100% reliable: electricity and data. Probabilities and reliability can be calculated all day long, but what really matters is what happens in a jet loaded with twenty tons of jet fuel and hundreds of passengers, hurtling at eight-tenths of the speed of sound eight miles above the Earth.

Let's consider a real-life scenario.

For me, the most vulnerable phase of any flight is the takeoff. That's when the jet has the maximum amount of fuel on board and is at its heaviest. Starting from a dead stop, the plane has the least amount of energy to spare as it generates sufficient speed on a finite runway.

As the plane goes down that runway, we have to make decisions quickly and correctly, under conditions of uncertainty.

What I know from hands-on experience is that the crucial, instantaneous decision to stop or go must take into account how potential system failures will indirectly (but drastically) affect other critical systems on the aircraft. For example, electrical problems may disable vital components like hydraulic controls, anti-skid braking or wing spoilers — all of which are necessary to abort takeoff safely. A pilot has to perceive and detect the subtle interconnections as they occur.

The weakness of "remote control" is its very essence: electrical. Any power disruption takes away not only the remote sensing to detect any malfunction, it also renders the remote pilot effectively blind, mute, and unable to issue commands to the aircraft as a result.

Once an electrical or data stream failure occurs on board, the dilemma is a bit like trying to fix your home wireless connection with online help: If you can't connect, there's no help. In any phase of a flight, that would be fatal.

Rather than experiencing the flight, any remote operator must rely on electrical sensing, data transmission and analysis. There's a gulf of time, distance and sensation separating plane and pilot and data is limited: Some remote piloting veterans I've spoken with have said it's like viewing the cockpit through a straw.

Pilots on board transcend that uncertainty with real-time, specific observation and experience related to their actual jet, at that second, in that airspace, as they experience it.

Engineers can design all of redundancy they want, but even in manned jets, today's largest threats are the onboard computer system failures that silently take out a layer of automated functionality with no warning. If the onboard operating system is part of the automation that fails, the jet becomes an unguided missile. Add to that a reliance on a critical, hackable, corruptible data stream, and you are staking hundreds of lives on partial, damaged or failed data, rather than firsthand experience.

The stark reality of life in a jetliner today is that in the event of an electrical failure — which is not that rare — the pilots make do, and land immediately.

Based on several in-flight aircraft fires in recent years that resulted in fatal crashes, the immediate action to save all aboard is sometimes shutting down all electrical power. That's not an option for any remotely piloted vehicle.

The remote flight technology available today falls woefully below the minimal standard for ensuring human lives. That's a fact driven home by the destruction of 14 of the most advanced remotely piloted vehicles in just the first three months of this year.

Even unmanned, these aircraft accidents pose an enormous potential for collateral damage: The Washington Postnoted "drones have slammed into homes, farms, runways, highways, waterways" and in one case, another aircraft in flight.

The vulnerability goes beyond technical capability to human adaptability, and that's a line which we simply can't and shouldn't cross.

In 1989, a DC-10 with 296 souls aboard experienced an engine failure that did what engineers said wasn't possible: A combination of flight control, hydraulic, electric and engine damage rendered the huge jet unflyable.

That's when Captain Al Haynes and the other three pilots in the cockpit did what pilots always do: They adapted. On the spot, they invented an asymmetric throttle technique to roughly but positively control the aircraft pitch just enough to put the jet down on the runway at Sioux City, Iowa. One hundred eighty five passengers walked away from what would otherwise have been the certain death of 296.

Pilots on board an airliner provide exactly what the definition of "remote" control eliminates: physical presence, independence from the jet and cumulative experience. Most important of all, they have the analytical ability to perceive and adapt in real time, on the spot.

Eight miles above the ground at 500 miles per hour, I can't imagine why anyone would bet their life on anything less.

Chris Manno has been an airline pilot since 1985 and a captain since 1991. He currently flies the Boeing 737-800 based out of Dallas/Fort Worth. Prior to that, he was a United State Air Force pilot and officer for seven years. Find him on Twitter at @Chris_Manno.

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